The people that own this property, Allen and Mikey Isbell, are ministering to this congregation of people and are having Sunday Church Services in their greenhouse or sun-room as seen in this 360-degree panorama. A panorama of their actual church building has been seen in an earlier panorama: tinyurl.com/Galves ...

Gigapan Comments
(9)

You have made some good comments, which I have
been reflecting on these past few days. Every
GigaPan presents a unique situation, especially so
with taking panoramas of people in the different
situations we have been chatting about these past
weeks. As I see it, you have done more than I have
with moving crowds and by now, you sort of know
what to do from your past experiences. For me, I
too have learned from my mistakes and by that, I
mean to say that I tend to have a more controlled
environment where the subject or subjects are
posed as in this panorama taken in Galveston after
a church service. In this current pano, I did not
have fleeting ladies (www.gigapan.org/gigapans/15029/snap
shots/44250/), nor did I suffer fleeting feet
(www.gigapan.org/gigapans/19298/snap
shots/58027/). But I am always happy with the
results that I upload to gigapan dot org, simply
for the reason I I mentioned before: *The key is
artistic control and every GigaPan or panorama has
its pluses and minuses. That's why this hobby
of ours is so fascinating. *

You are probably right about there being a happy
medium, but I think it will take a lot of
experience to work out where and what it is. The
basic problem - as I see it - is that one does not
have the opportunity to practice shooting groups
of people, and groups of people have even less
experience of being shot (as it were). In
particular, I have yet to crack the problem of how
to handle people who are in the overlap between
adjacent images. Asking everybody to remain
motionless for the entire duration of the shot is
one option but not practical for large groups. I
suppose one could try spreading people out more,
perhaps into small groups with gaps between. This
is essentially what I did in the Juarassic Coast
group shot (tinyurl.com/ybzbc9z ). As you know, I work
in schools and I have thought about some kind of
system where the children are grouped into
numbered sections so that each child knows which
section they are in, then I could shout out
"OK, section two, you can move" and
"Get ready section three" etc. Another
idea is to rehearse the shot with some markers eg
broom handles stuck in the ground. Yet another is
to deliberately include everyone more than once by
asking them to move further down the line after
they have been photographed. That way one would
increase the chances that everyone will appear in
the photo at least once with the right number of
heads and limbs.

There has to be a happy medium somewhere in all of
this. Your Jane Austen GigaPan is pretty
incredible and could not be done any other way.
The focus problem is that that bad, and as you
mentioned, the 100-plus audience did not help. But
when you are famous, you will always attract a
crowd. Contrast your situation with this GigaPan:
A passo di Danza 1, gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=2241
0. It has 21 photos taken over 101 seconds,
and not surprisingly shows some movement, but I
admire his effort. My panorama on the other hand,
has 23 stitched photos and was taken twice (with
some pauses) and from the two sets, the final
product was assembled. The key is artistic control
and every GigaPan or panorama has its pluses and
minuses. That's why this hobby of ours is so
fascinating.

I had a similar experience taking tinyurl.com/yarnp9y - people wanted to get
away, it took too long, people weren't sure
what was expected of them, plus I was too far away
to talk to people directly - and I had an audience
of about 100 people while I was working which was
somewhat nerve-wracking. All sorts of things went
wrong and the image ulimately ended up out of
focus, but I learned a lot about what doesn't
work and what to do differently next time. In
essence, it boils down to this: employ half a
dozen really big, mean-looking guys with electric
cattle prods to keep people in line. One should
have a tazer gun in case someone tries to make a
break for it. Re using a gigapan, my idea was to
shoot the scene twice. First shoot the background,
then shoot just the people using columns so that
each person doesn't have to keep still for too
long. Then combine the two gigapans and stitch.
The first problem with this idea is that there is
no way of telling the imager "I want you to
take a 20 column, 3 row gigapan starting at column
7, row 8 of the last gigapan you took." The
result is that the two gigapans did not line up
very well. I discovered that in fact the gigapan
stitcher deals with this surprisingly well -
images that are supposed to be columns can be half
a picture out and the stitcher copes with it.
However, I didn't have the patience to combine
the 1600 images of the background with the 256
images of the people (plus 120 images of the
foreground grass that I missed when I did the
background) so I chucked everything into Autopano.
After many, many untrapped crashes and quite a few
unfruitful requests for support, I upgraded my
machine to 8Gb and 64-bit Winders, and found that
I could just about stitch and render half the the
gigapan. Fortunately there were half a Royal
Crescent's-worth of people left by the time I
finished shooting the people, so I didn't have
to leave anyone out, although obviously, having
only half of the houses is very disappointing. One
advantage to using Autopano is that I could render
the people using Smartblend which is phenomenally
good at resolving issues caused by movement. I
don't recommend you buy Autopano because in my
experience it is too buggy and I think it is
expensive, but it is worth knowing that this is an
option should you wish to come over to the Dark
Side of stitching.

Good point, but as you might determine from
Stitcher Notes, this GigaPan took maybe a bit more
than five minutes to complete. People were anxious
to leave and eat or whatever people usually do
after Church. A longer time could have been taken
to make a larger panorama with a robot, but as you
can tell in this panorama, there is minimal
stitching problems, which for this bunch, we would
have had many stitching errors had I used the
robot.

Thanks Kilgore661, After Services were over with,
there was very little planning. Everyone just fell
in place so-to-speak, and I took two sets of
photographs and from those two sets, I constructed
the 360-panorama.